The Chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee says he now has proof that some of the companies many of us do business with online every day are signing on with scammers.

Those scammers end up charging people for things many do not even know they're buying.  It adds up to scamming worth more than $1.4 billion dollars bilked from some 30 million Americans so far.

"It is so darn disturbing to me to learn through our investigation that we've done in this committee, over 300,000 pages of research, what's happening to millions of American consumers every day who are shopping on the Internet," Senator Jay Rockefeller said.

He lead a hearing Tuesday on Capitol Hill in the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on "Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers."

As part of an investigation over the past six months, those with the Commerce Committee have found instances of aggressive sales tactics from companies like Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty to charge people for services customers do not use or may not even know they're purchasing.

Senator Rockefeller claims those companies are paying some well known e-commerce websites and retailers, about 450 of them, for access to customer information.  People sign up for these membership clubs, unknowingly, during the online checkout process.

Sales offers from Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty come up during the post transaction phase of an online purchase, after people have made a purchase, but before they have completed the sale confirmation process.

The offers may promise cash back rewards and look like they're part of the original purchase an online shopper is trying to make.

"What's happening is that many online merchants have decided to betray their customers' trust," the Senator said.  "For a few extra bucks in profits, these merchants pass their consumers' personal billing information on to mysterious companies."

He says he wants to change the online scamming the same way phone scams have, in many cases, been reigned in over the years.

"We expect the merchants we do business with to treat us honestly," Senator Rockefeller said.

The Commerce Committee investigation is still ongoing.

So far, investigators have turned up a number of interesting items including the fact that 98% of Vertrue's customer calls are cancellation calls and Classmates.com made more than $70 million through such aggressive marketing practices.